


Tried and Tested

by Aicosu



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angela is responsible for saving Genji trope, Angst and Feels, Canon Compliant, Canon Universe, F/M, Light Angst, Medical Jargon, Origin Story, some descriptions of medical injuries and blood, subtle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-18
Updated: 2017-03-18
Packaged: 2018-10-06 22:14:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10345662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aicosu/pseuds/Aicosu
Summary: Genji receives a package from Overwatch.





	

He hadn’t reached out to anyone in Overwatch for years.

That explained his surprise at seeing the box, cardboard and stamped all over, sitting in the center of his room. It was clearly out of place. Modern, with bright packaging tape and the Overwatch logo shining on the side of it. It clashed with the humble walls of his Nepal quarters.

It clashed with a lot of things.

He considered the world outside his room, listening to the far-off bells of the monastery, counting the final clicks of the sun as it set. Dinner had left him warm, easy. But the words _“you received mail today,”_ from his master had put cold and anxiousness into the creases of his skin where he touched metal.

He closed the door with hesitation.

But he approached the box swiftly, coming to one knee and twisting it center before him. It was heavy.

The tape came apart easy once he slid the catch of it between the metal plating of one of his fingers. The sharp edge sliced it smoothly down the middle. And with fear of losing his momentum in this confrontation, he quickly lifted the flaps and pulled away the foam layer protecting the contents.

It was paper. Mostly.

A large foot by foot box of papers. Files. Binders.

His anxiousness bottomed out. Nerves gone and confusion taking place. Why would Overwatch send him paperwork? Who? Who would send him paperwork?

An envelope at the top of the pile written with his name on it seemed to answer him and it followed the same fate as the box. Slit and opened.

 _‘Genji—_  
_I had to close headquarters in Gibraltar for some security reasons. Found a lot of things with your name on it and wasn’t sure if you wanted it or not. Hope to maybe hear back from you about RECALL. Winston’_

The explanation really only lead to more questions, but his unease was definitely gone.

He had been avoiding the Recall. But at least Winston was not insistent. Especially when his days at Overwatch had been… strained at most. He liked the scientist, he was a good man. In a matter of words, anyway.

But what sort of things could Overwatch have in his name? It didn’t make any sense. He was no office administrator. And most of the briefings inclusive of him had been for Blackwatch. Classified. Under the table. No paperwork needed.

Genji didn’t ever remember filling out a form the entire time he’d been there.

Sitting properly, on the floor of his small room, he set the letter aside and immediately picked up the first file and there, clear on the side tab of it, was SHIMADA, GENJI.

But it was the first few pages that made him realize what the mix up was.

 _SHIMADA, GENJI, 02.445.88_  
_Brought in at 2:40 am; Massive blood loss from several penetrations and lacerations, severed limbs including the left arm below elbow, partial bisection--_

His hands folded the manila shut, metal digits clicking with the speed.

Ah.

These were all his medical papers.

Genji reassessed the box beside him, anxiety back in heavy layers he couldn’t describe.

Perhaps this wasn’t the time for this. He hadn’t visited any of the details of his recovery since…

Well, he never had.

The time of his life directly after that fateful night with his brother was hazy at best. He didn’t remember much but the smell of metal and antiseptic. The horrible white-cushion-walled room where he went through physical therapy, listening to Jack Morrison yell at him and— anger.

He remembered anger. Throbbing, all-encompassing anger. An anger he could taste, could smell, could hold onto until it formed its own color in front of his eyes.

He didn’t really recall anything but that.

Without thinking, he let the folder spread open on his lap, his thumb flitting through to show him the other pages.

This was all descriptions mostly. Lots of printed fine copy, hospital procedures. Genji frowned at the vocabulary, feeling a little young looking at medical jargon he couldn’t even pronounce, let alone know how to read in English. Other papers didn’t look English at all. When he reached the end of the pages to hand torn leaflets of notes, he realized it probably wasn’t.

_"Day 1 - 15. -  Angela Ziegler"_

The Z in her name was massive. Much more like the stamps of single character signings he was used to, in Kanji.

Angela.

Well, of course.

Genji flipped back to the first page, the description of his body, and realized her name was there too, hidden at the bottom.

Angela Ziegler. Attending.

His doctor.

Genji knew that. He had always known that. It wasn’t a surprise. She had visited him often throughout recuperation. Asking questions he had never bothered answering. _“Are you alright?: "How are you feeling?" "Any nausea?”_ He could remember the words, could remember staring at her shoes, could remember anger pulling his head apart with a pain he never voiced.

He swallowed, not expecting the flood of guilt from behavior he had forgotten about.

He set the folder aside, his hand digging for the next one, eager to look for something other than shame.

The box rewarded him with a folder of photos of his body, bloody, broken, bruised and bisected, in fluorescent lights and stark white medical rooms.

It made him sick instantly. He couldn’t look at them for long. He had known, — had always known it had been — bad. Terrible.

But seeing himself? Like that—

The pain is what he had remembered.

He remembered screaming so hard his ears had felt cold and wet with blood. He had remembered the feeling of being on fire from the inside out. Remembered feeling as though knives had slowly dug into his skin, to grab at his insides.

He remembered the drug induced type sick imaginations of what his pain had meant. How he had thought he’d looked with his eyes shut tight with tears and rage.

He hadn’t ever actually seen his body before it had gone. And of course, he knew what had gone. He could tell what had been unsalvageable by simply looking at himself now. His legs, his arms. From his toes to his fingertips. Everything from his jaw down.

His hand drew a line from his ear to his chin in thought, avoiding looking down at the pictures in his hands showing the evidence.

He folded the photos to the side, finding files of x rays after. Broken fingers, missing arm, broken hip, ribs, ah— there was his jaw, or there it was, missing. Metal in his stomach? A memory of his sword being shoved past his hands into his stomach flashed through his mind.Yes, that’s right.

He made a small game of holding the black folio sheets to candlelight to see the wounds and guess where they had come from. An arrow here, a blade there. Falling from the second floor to the first.

He thought he might be angry, as he continued, but instead he sort of just… remembered. Images of Hanzo coming and going from his mind as if recalling what he had eaten the day before. Part of him now, he supposed.

This was good.

He could almost hear his Master agreeing with him in his own imagination.

When the x rays ran out, Genji found more photos. They were less gruesome but no less jarring.

He could see himself, there in the photo, lying prone on a metal table and covered in strips of plastic bandages and cellophane, but he couldn’t remember it. And there were stacks of these, of him, at different times, different angles, some with his wounds or missing limbs exposed and others with him so wrapped up in tubes and vinyl that he looked like a packaged mannequin. Fake. Robotic.

He didn’t like the word in his head and he tried to forget it by flipping through the photos more quickly.

He stopped when a tear of paper slid into his fingers. A handwritten note taped ever so delicately on the gloss film of a picture. One of just his face, or what could be seen of it with a plastic frame around his head from his forehead to the jaw he knew must not be there.

That big Z stood out again.

_"Day 41. Breathing on his own again. Stabilized! -Angela Ziegler"_

He could almost hear her say it in his head. The roll of her sharp ‘s’s making him understand the focus of her tone. It was almost enough to distract him from the time marker.

41 days?

Genji had known he had been under a while. But more than a month?

Looking back into the box, he found more. More photos, more records, forms, folders. Notes.

Angela had written dozens and dozens of notes.

_“Day 53. Plans drawn up for his substitutions need major reworking. What about his lungs? - Angela Ziegler”_

_“TSP 32233. Orders from Numbani DEV for hand prototypes. Sent to team for testing. - Angela Ziegler”_

_“Day 57. Taking patient off painkillers for sensory testing. Not recommended for more than 30min. Es ist zu viel. - Angela Ziegler"_

There was a lot like that. Moments where the doctor’s English would disappear. A few notes he could not fully understand. Missing pieces Genji found himself staring at with slight frustration.

In the next few folders, he began to put the timeline together.

It had taken a month for the medical team to clean him up, patch his wounds, and stabilize him as much as they could with the aid of machines to keep him alive. After that, it was another month of ordering parts. Parts. Genji found all of them. Blueprints of every part. Of him. The ideas of what he was now jotted down on paper. A team of people working on an entire person. Reconstructing. Remaking him. Almost from scratch.

And Angela…

Angela was…

_"Patient record shows he was 5’6”. Send back these prototype for the right proportions. Nicht mehr, nicht weniger. - Angela Ziegler"_

_"Please order more from INTEL about shoe size. Need by the 24th. - Angela Ziegler”_

_"Genji was not left handed, remove neural honing for the left side. - Angela Ziegler"_

He looked down at his hands then.Dropping the note listlessly to stare at his left fingers as he moved them. The resistance in his joints felt natural. Expected, from someone who had never worked that limb. He had never thought… that, of course, he would be… more than he once was. A machine was a perfect thing. Wasn’t it?

But Angela had not done that.

And there was more. So much more. The folders closer to the bottom of the box had photos of him from before. Photos he recognized. His ceremony photos from high school. Class rosters from his kendo club. His city license, the photos from a cousin’s wedding. Printed images from his phone. Photos he remembered taking. Of him and friends, fucking around at the arcade. Snapshots that had been buried in a life he thought long gone, sitting there in front of him almost like they weren’t his.

And they were mapped out in sheets, with notes, as if they were more sets of x rays that were seeing through his life instead of seeing through his bones.

 _‘36 inches, 42 inches’_ Angela had written, a pen marking his height next to a classmate's.

 _‘6.85 more than the forearm'_   She noted, talking about his shoulders in a picture of him and Hanzo in a summer trip, their bare arms raised to call over their uncle, who took the photo.

He had hated that. His fingers let the picture fall to the massive pile slowly enclosing his small room, crawling up his body as he lost himself in it. He pressed at the synthetic mass of his shoulder.

 _‘You’ll fall over at this rate,’_ Hanzo used to tease. Because no matter how much weight he would press, it had always been easier for Genji to gain muscles on his back and shoulders than his legs or abs, making his proportions frustrating.

He had hated it.

Another photo of him, one from his phone, a picture of him in the sunlight, smiling, was littered with Angela. Maybe one of the more recent to this body he’d seen yet. _‘2.34 indention along chin,’ ‘24mm lip x, 20, y, 19,’ ‘GAIN Style Kummono Midori #2345,’_

The first was a scar he’d got when he was 7. Slipping onto an antique desk where he’d sliced open his jaw running from his brother in a game he forgot the rules to.

It was there. He could feel the groove now, staring at the picture like a mirror, feeling the scratched in drilled scar on his jaw, just where it had been. Like it had never left.

The next was the measurements for his own mouth. For the bottom lip he no longer had. Except he did. Right here. He pinched the plastic shelled silicone, the nerves lighting into his brain to tell him the pressure was there. That even silver, gray, corded and artificial, it was there. In the exact same size and ratio it had always been.

The last was his hair dye. It was almost ridiculous to see, written like that, but there it was. Complete with clipped in pictures of him comatose on her metal table, bald. Follicles damaged, burned and shaved away. Then pictures of hair wefts mapped out, then bleached, then dyed.

Angela had not just given him hair— hair he hadn’t even known wasn’t real.

She’d given back his hair. _His._

The digits of his hands delved into the mess of green on his head, pulled on it, feeling the oh-so-real sensation of it tugging back. She’d— cut it. Dyed it.

And his arms.

He stilled to bring them forward again, turning them over to find the glued up scarred elbow he’d gotten from a bar fight a year before his fight with Hanzo. Right there, in the carbon fibers. Torn and stitched together. On his too small forearms and too big shoulders. Apart of a body exactly 5’7” in its always-just-a-bit-shorter-than-his-big-brother glory.

He was staring at it in a new perspective, one that was coming too late.

How had he not noticed before?

He thought back to those first few days. Waking up in a body that wasn’t his. Learning to move again, learning to feel again. Picking at the metal of his fingers and hating that he wasn’t real, wasn’t himself. Wasn’t right. That the body was a bagged and tagged serialized number they had shoved him into, stapled together, and then told to fight.

Something in him realized it had been easy.

It had been so easy to acclimate that he didn’t even remember when it happened. Because she’d done that. She’d put the seams on his body where he’d had seams in his skin, drilled in screws to copy moles, chipped his metal where he’d chipped his life.

And all those things he hated were back to hold him steady, and the overwhelming surge of love for those little flaws he’d loathed nearly overtook him.

Genji stood, shaky, trying not to look at the care, attention, and undeserved consideration staring back up at him in all those little handwritten ‘Z’s and dated doctor notes.

And then the memories he did have came back. Angela standing close to his bedside each morning, eyes trying to find his.

_“Are you alright?" "How are you feeling?" "Any nausea?”_

His stomach felt sick, but from an entirely different reason than before.

Winston had been wrong to send him this. Even with his name plastered all over every file, these things obviously belonged to Dr. Ziegler.

Just as he did.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a thorough headcanon I had that I wanted to write about. I think Mercy would want the transition to be as easy as possible and she stikes me as an above and beyond, thats-a-little-too-much-attention-to-detail-doc type. Whereas the difference is so much, I don't think Genji would notice. :( 
> 
> German:  
>  _Es ist zu viel_ — It's too much  
>  _Nichts mehr oder weniger_ — No more, no less.


End file.
